STEPHANIE RUHLE (HOST): Yesterday Sean Spicer was somewhat trying to walk us back from this voter fraud, saying, “Well, President Trump has believed this, he's heard it in some reports.” And we heard from guys like [Sen.] Lindsey Graham [(R-SC)] saying, “There is no fact behind this. The president needs to retract this.” Yet, you're on the Today show this morning basically debunking this, saying that there is no proof, and within minutes, ba-boom, Donald Trump sending out a tweet, launching a major investigation. So what's happening here?
ARI MELBER: Well I'll tell you part of what's happening and you lay it out well. I was speaking with Matt Lauer about why these claims are false and but if they were true, of course you would have an investigation if 3 to 5 million people committed crimes and as you say within about two minutes we saw those two tweets from Donald Trump. Here are the facts though. Pew has done the study that was mischaracterized by the campaign and by now the government. They basically found 24 million entries on voting rolls where there was a wrong name because a voter died, moved, or had been inactive. That's a paperwork problem. It does not go towards whether there are people committing the crimes. And the author of that study has rebutted this repeatedly, most recently saying, “As primary author of the report the Trump camp cited, I can confirm the report made no findings about voter fraud whatsoever.” What's particularly egregious is there are disagreements in life and politics and government, and many of them can be good faith and we referee those sometimes. This is not one of them. I want to be very clear. The Trump campaign aides were called out on this by Mr. [David] Becker, who wrote the study, months ago. Sean Spicer has reason to know that he spoke a falsehood from that podium yesterday, and now you have the talk of the investigation. Investigating what?
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The problem is, and I want to be clear about this, the problem is what appears to be a deliberate effort by what is now the United States government to lie and confuse the fact that there are voter registration problems with an allegation that there were 3 to 5 million felonies committed, a massive, multi-million person criminal conspiracy. And if that didn't happen, they need to stop lying about it.
